1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of computer processing and, more particularly, to the monitoring of application performance.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the information technology (IT) departments of modern organizations, one of the biggest challenges is meeting the increasingly demanding service levels required by users. With more and more applications directly accessible to customers via automated interfaces such as the world wide web, “normal” business hours for many enterprises are now 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. As a result, the importance of monitoring and maintaining the quality of computational services has increased dramatically.
The performance of computational services may be monitored on both the server side and the client side. For example, the response times of a web server may be monitored to ensure that customers are easily able to access certain web pages. Monitoring the server side may comprise monitoring one or more applications executing on a cluster of nodes. Such a cluster of nodes may comprise a utility computing environment, wherein the computational power of one or more servers may be purchased as needed. Alternatively, dozens or hundreds of nodes may be organized into interconnected tiers of web servers, application servers and databases. Each node in such a system may execute multiple instances of one or more applications, with each instance operable to handle a different client request.
In such a distributed computing environment, application instances may be created or destroyed as demand changes. Application instances may also migrate from node to node in response to a hardware or software failure, or in response to a load-balancing algorithm, for example. However, monitoring systems may be unable to track the migration of instances from node to node, thereby preventing the monitoring system from presenting a complete picture of a given application instance. Furthermore, monitoring systems may not be operable to monitor data on the creation or destruction of application instances. Existing prior art software performance monitors do not correlate performance data with events, such as the creation, migration or destruction of a particular application instance, and across all instances of a particular application, application group, and/or technology tier.